When advertising using an online advertisement service provider such as Yahoo! Search Marketing™, or performing a search using an internet search engine such as Yahoo!™, users often wish to determine semantically related words. Two words or phrases are semantically related if the words or phrases are related in meaning in a language or in logic. Obtaining semantically related words or phrases allow advertisers to broaden or focus their online advertisements to relevant potential customers and allows searchers to broaden or focus their Internet searches in order to obtain more relevant search results.
U.S. patent application Ser. No. 10/020,712, filed Dec. 11, 2001, discloses recommendation of search terms to a user using collaborative filtering and web spidering. Various other methods and systems for determining semantically related terms are disclosed in U.S. patent application Ser. Nos. 11/432,266 and 11/432,585, filed May 11, 2006, assigned to Yahoo! Inc. For example, in some implementations in accordance with U.S. patent Ser. Nos. 11/432,266 and 11/432,585, a system determines semantically related terms based on web pages that advertisers have associated with various terms during interaction with an advertisement campaign management system of an online advertisement service provider. In other implementations in accordance with U.S. patent Ser. Nos. 11/432,266 and 11/432,585, a system determines semantically related terms based on terms received at a search engine and a number of times one or more searchers clicked on particular universal resource locators (“URLs”) after searching for the received terms.
It would be desirable to develop additional systems and methods for determining semantically related terms based other sources of data.